Lifesaving poems of summer

Now that we might finally be getting one, I found myself wondering recently how many of my Lifesaving Poems choices were about the summer. (I should say I’m generally against this kind of reductionist thinking: any good poem is always about more than it is about. But it is my blog and I make the rules. So humour me).

As I ploughed through the choices I have written about so far themes began to emerge. There is driving (Night Drive, A Private Life); eating and drinking outdoors (The Picnic; Jet; K563; Eating Outside); and of course sport (To My Heart at the Close of Day; Nightwatchman; Deep Third Man).

But most of all it struck me how many of the poems are about being alone, even when the speaker is in company (Results; Eating Outside; Aunt Julia; Coming Home; This morning was cold; K563). The more I read these poems the more the ‘subject’ of summer seems a kind frail pretence to explore the real action, a kind of deep interior questing which is rarely resolved.

Whether the poems are explicitly elegiac (Aunt Julia; Nightwatchman; Deep Third Man), epiphanic (Eating Outside; Jet; A Morning), or low-key (K563; June 30, 1974) this lack of resolution (Autobiography; This morning was cold; Results) appears to be self-consciously and actively sought by each poem’s speaker. These are poems where, in Stephen Berg’s Eating Outsisde, ‘the self, awed by changes,/… pauses/clear, white and unseen’, nevertheless ‘longing so hard to make/inclusions that the longing/has become in memory/an inclusion’ (Autobigoraphy).